


Nothing But Secrets

by FancyLadySnackCakes



Category: Taboo (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Ghosts, UST, mystery theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 00:34:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9631844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FancyLadySnackCakes/pseuds/FancyLadySnackCakes
Summary: There were ghosts in this house. Winter told her so on the shore and for some dastardly reason, Lorna wanted to find them.-takes place after episode five-





	

Lorna had her own secrets, of course, she did, but it was usually best not to think of them. She’d heard through gossip and outlandish rumors that Mr. Delaney, James, could enter the minds of his accomplices and it seemed she was one of them now. It was easy during the day with her Shakespearean literature always at hand to not think much about the more devious aspects in her mind. The theater was always most consuming in both body and mind to find herself worried about where her thoughts may stray...but at night…

At night she would find herself awake in the darkness, willing traitorous thoughts to just sleep as her body wanted to do. 

She tried to mold her thoughts into tangible things, real and physical enough to lock away in a trunk as she did late Mr. Delaney’s letters and, in a more clearer sense, his own secrets. Lorna lay in bed with the rich Egyptian cotton surrounding her and wished she could know where it was James lingered and if he could pull the secrets from her as easily as plucking a rose. Did he erect altars to gods or devils she couldn’t even dream of knowing? Or was it that he was much like a minion of Beelzebub himself and had the ability at will to see what he wanted? No, no she knew he didn’t. If he were able, he’d have had no use for her complacency in getting him his father’s trunk.

But, Lorna, she heard herself chime, he had no love for the letters as you did. Not an ounce of curiosity even, as though he had somehow already read everything there was to gain from them. Some witchcraft of his so doubt. It was only the treaty he was after and he found it already. Now she was merely a parasite on the arse of his claim. 

She turned in bed, eyes glossing over the painted bedside table where Mr. Cholmondeley’s gift rested. That social pariah of a Chemist intrigued her enough that she’d flipped through the book with a wan smile on her back to her room that evening. Her fingers had itched to grab his letter as well, but James had been watching and she felt it wrong to read an admirer's letter with his knowledge. That ideal was most unbecoming of her. Seldom did she bow to a man’s wishes, especially unspoken, but like everyone else around Mr. Delaney, she was drawn to him in a way wholly unrelatable to anything she could properly name.

He was a mystery and Lorna has grown up with a passionate love for mystery novels - it felt at times she was inside one herself. Living here was never a dull affair, though her life was never dull. Not really. The life of an actress was hard to make droll at the weakest of times. She felt as though she could use a little boredom in her life right now, though. Enough to help her sleep, maybe. 

With a quiet sigh, she gave up on the notion of dreams and shifted up in bed, pressing an elbow into the down pillow. The book gifted to her by James’ Chemist was a well-read copy of ‘Venus and Adonis’ - a typical volume given the Giftor. Perhaps he thought to be witty with his choice. She could imagine such a man noting the erotic nature of some acts and thinking himself cheeky, maybe flattering. Certainly meant to instill her with sexual images of the two of them. Lorna almost found it charming of him, but she’d received gifts in equal and better measure than this. Perhaps the letter she’d neglected to read complimented the book better than the gesture did on its own.  
She’d have thrown back the covers and fetched it if not for a strange sense of unease. 

There had been nights where she could hear murmurings by the fire, and though she could not hear any now the silence was just as queer as the foreign chanting had been previously. 

One could not live in the same house as James and not hear him during some nights, speaking with ghosts or demons or whatever Africa had given to him. 

It was not that she was scared. No, Lorna was rarely scared of the world or the things that inhabited it and if she were it was easy to pretend she wasn’t...mostly. Men with white smiles such as Mr. Coop aside, she prided herself on being a madonna of her time. Unshakable. 

There, on the table in the sitting room, Mr. Cholmondeley’s letter would stay, but it was by her own choice. A choice that did not revolve around James Delaney. That is, of course, if it hadn’t been burnt already. The idea of James snatching her letter up only to toss it into the flames made her lips screw down sourly. It would be something he’d do for whatever reason it was he had. It would not be that he liked her as men often times liked women. 

She had entertained the idea that he may have held a dim torch for her. Inviting her to the Galla gave her many strange feelings about the man, but the idea of him loving anything was hard to grasp. Yes, he could be oddly kind and attentive but the rest was of no warmth. 

The wide, doe eyes of his half-sister stared back at her in the darkness, shining with moonlight and she nearly scoffed the memory away. Beautiful, she was, but Lorna had met many beautiful women more so than she and it had never bothered her before. It didn’t now, of course, but there was something about the woman that gave her more than a preliminary pause. She too, was not as she seemed, and if James loved anything more than his cause then it may have been her. Usually, another woman catching the eye of a potential suitor of hers would make her territorial by nature. This, however, was not the case. 

Why that was, Lorna couldn't say. 

Her thoughts churned throughout the night. When she awoke in the morning it was clear she’d at some point slept but it was a fleeting sensation and as she dressed for her day she felt close to delirium. Even though breakfast of hard seed bread and basted eggs was filling, she could not keep her eyes open for the life of her. 

“Will you be requiring tea or shall I fetch you a cold bucket of seawater to rouse you from the deep?”

Brace came to life before her, around a haze of foggy sleep. Lorna blinked, curled her fingers into the duvet and gave him a strained smile. She couldn’t recall falling asleep, much as she couldn’t remember the night before. It was a feeling much like being submerged under warm water. Perhaps the bucket would suffice in place of tea. 

“No,” she simpered, “I’m just going to get some air.”

“Mr. Delaney has left me with instructions not to let you out of the house-” he started; timber rising in his brogue.

Lorna huffed, twining her skirts about her wrist before lifting off the duvet, her chin raised high, “I am not a trinket nor a bird to be locked away in a cage or a rubbish drawer. If Mr. Delaney wishes me to stay inside he can shackle me if it suits him. Which it doesn’t.” Brace frowned at her - one of those deep set lines that conjured up images of roman soldiers forced to do the deeds of more powerful men. 

“You mean like that bloody canary of yours; singin’ all day?”

She frowned at that, but a bird was not a woman and a woman, not a bird. “Brace,” she addressed, “If James should ask where I am you can say you did your best.”

“He don’t concern himself with you enough for that.”

At that she smirked, catching an amusing glimmer in his eyes. 

“No,” she intoned, “I suppose he doesn’t.”

The shoreline was incorrigible, to say the least. The thick reek of fish invaded her nostrils and the high winds off the sea stung her cheeks, twisting her loose curls around the corners of her eyes. It was better than inside, though. Lorna drew in a heavy chest of air and allowed her eyes to shut. Out here, amongst the breeze, she couldn't doze off as she would in the lounge. 

A half-rotted post, framed by dead, sea-stained trunks made a pleasant enough place to sit. She remembers James sitting in the empty space beside her, peeling his egg and watching the shore as if he could read the future in the waves. Perhaps he could. 

Out the side of her eyes, she almost swore she caught Mr. Delaney watching her...

Down the shore, she spotted a trio of short dark silhouettes. One wielding a cane and a top knot of hair. Two smaller shadows waving and bobbing behind the first. As they grew closer Lorna sat up from the old wood and stood there poised and waiting. The mulatto girl. Winter, her name was, carried a ruddy scalp at her side. 

She swallowed a breath, feeling oddly struck with a case of stage fright as the girl and her two companions nearly glided towards her. Like ghosts. 

Lorna folded her hands over her stomach, nervous and at once curious. There was a small groove in the handle of Winter’s cane. A trademark found only in weaponized walking sticks. She, although small and of few words, was dangerous. A mystery much like Mr. Delaney himself. That man could tell her the girl was one of his spirits and Lorna would believe him. 

“Mornin’ ma’am.”

Lorna nodded, unused to talking to children and vagabond ones even less, “Good Morning to you as well, Winter.”

The girl stared at her against the sea winds. Her two companions stood paces behind her, one a boy coated in chimney soot and the other of indecisive gender or color; dressed as it was in layers of stained cloth. Corkscrew curls, like vintage chocolate, flew about Winter’s fat cheeks. In the silence, there came a rumble and then, “You're nothing like her you know. Seems strange…”

Lorna remained steady; steeling herself against the breeze that stung her eyes and parched her lips. Winter frightened her in some unsaturated way, but she did not want to run like she had when Mr. Coop had held her ribbons in his fingers. 

“How so?” She asked back, seeing James’ half-sister outside the corner of her eye, down the shore. 

“Did you see the ghosts last night?” Winter asked instead, eyes wide, mouth almost in the form of a smile, “I saw ‘em and they were calling out to us. All ‘ahv us. In different ways.”

Last night in bed she'd heard nothing and seen nothing of the sort, but her thoughts had never stopped not once it seemed. That unease she'd shielded herself from with Egyptian cotton and literature never left. Lorna felt it now; swallowed it in the air around her. She saw something ancient in the brown face looking up at her and found herself shaken. Her fingers twitch at the drapes in her dress. 

“Well,” she cleared her throat, working her lips to find the words, “what-what did they say?”

“All sorts of things.”

The girl and her minions left her on the shore with water in her eyes and Lorna couldn't say if the beads of tears were from the spray of the sea or a fear she felt but couldn't name. 

She hovered for only a second by the sea, trying to make out the words Mr. Delaney read from but seeing nothing and knowing well enough to pull herself from the ocean lest it swallows her whole. Damn, Delaney’s were all mad and the son especially. Reading the waves? Foolish notions and she were a fool as well to think it true. 

He attracted all sorts of nefarious cretins and drogs, did James, and she supposed, as she reached for the unkempt door handle, that she was one among them. Perhaps, it was not him the fool but the rest of them. Puppets for sure. 

One last gaze at the shore, seeing nothing but damp earth, proved her right. 

Inside the shell of the house, Brace had tea ready. A bland, sweetless cup of it, but it soothed an ache in her bones. Calmed the fright. She'd long since dried her eyes before setting foot inside again. She was a lady and no one would think ill of her to see her grow misty-eyed, but her tears were for the stage, not for life. Lorna refused to let James see them again nor Brace ever. 

She took to the rest of the day reciting lines of poetry to the yellow down of her canary, basking in the low foggy light of the windows. It wasn't until Brace left her alone to run his errands for his Master that she stood from the duvet, tucked her running skirts in a loose knot around her calves and headed up the stairs. There were ghosts in this house. Winter told her so on the shore and for some dastardly reason, Lorna wanted to find them. Traces of them were strewn about this house and most of them rested in her room; James’ mother’s old prison. 

After coming in from the coast she saw them just outside her vision, almost a trickery that would leave her blinking away the stain of them. She refused to be played by them any longer. 

It was not the first time she'd explored the house in her lonesome, but she'd never piled up her skirts and done any real digging. It was unbecoming - at least she so thought until this morning. 

A fever, passionate and bewildering consumed her, on hands and knees under her bed and the dressers and cupboards. There was scant but dust and mouse droppings but still she looked, feeling as though she were close to a secret of the Delaney’s. When Brace cleared out the room for her he could not have been this insufferably thorough.

Just as she was about to huff, pick herself up and dust out her skirts she spied an emboss of light in the fireplace. Something crude...childlike in its rendering, perhaps...

“What are you doing?”

James caught her prone on the floorboards, by the fire with her fingers sifting out the ashes of that morning. The heat still trapped in the stone brought sweat to her forehead. A wreck, she was sure that's what he saw. A frightening depiction of a lady coated in soot and bright beads of perspiration. Had he seen her worse? He had, Lorna recalls that night after her impromptu carriage ride. But she still feels foolish despite it. 

“I was-it's nothing. Just a draft,” quick with a lie, though not as convincing as one well rehearsed. 

“Nothing's tarnished your petticoats,” he ruminated, staring at her in that way of his. A barely there nod of his chin and a rather droll blink made her sit back on her heels; glowering at him from across her room. 

“Is there something you wanted?” She asked, airy and impatient at once. 

“Seems to me I should be asking you that question. What is it that you,” his lips pursed the word, enunciating its importance, “want from me?”

“What I want?” Lorna repeated, ungainly from her position on her knees, covered in dust and soot and a thin layer of sweat. “Well, for starters I’d like my privacy, so if you don't mind-”

James lifted a hand, pointing between her and the fireplace with a finger stained with something brackish, “To sift through...soot?”

Indeed, most foolish, but she was not to be made so by a man like him. With a straight expression, she leveled her shoulders and gave a wan smile, “Yes. If you don't mind.”

Her only response was something that could have been a smile but most certainly wasn't and a low sounding grunt. At times she thought he looked more like Cerberus than a man - a wild mongrel whose only sustenance were the poor souls washed up on the shore. Maybe, in those waves, he heard the songs of the dead. The dead knew more than they did. Didn't they?. Knew all their petty secrets. 

James Delaney did not grace her with his presence for long, but he did spare a lengthy look at her copy of Venus and Adonis, her gift from the Chemist before he left her to gather herself from the floor. 

The reek of disapproval from his look lingered. 

Lorna did not go hunting for clues to unravel her mystery of ghost and phantoms until that night when she decided her boredom would only be abolished upon reading her admirers letter. There was little else entertaining is this shack of a manor and a love letter was always fun to devour, even those not written to her. Yet this one was written for her, just for her and she could assume with some truths that the one written to her by that outrageous man was vibrant indeed.

The house groaned as she walked through it. No matter how careful her steps, the old wood would talk and sing underneath her. Some part of it was endearing, but if the act could usher in James from whatever corner of darkness he hid, then she wanted not part in its song. She walked by candlelight towards the three-legged table where her letter rested. And though she had seen it that afternoon, long after James had left again, it was gone. 

She reached out, cursing succinctly under her breath and touched the tips of her fingers to the polished surface. 

A clatter aroused her. She turned, breath freezing in her lungs and noticed for the first time that the fire was blazing. It wasn't before. Or had it been? Lorna glanced at her waxing candle, swallowing a simpler. There had been no fire before now. 

This home fostered rotten souls. She could see them in the flames; swaying about. Disembodied forms cording around howling demons and animal sprites. Abominations from fairytales and the like. She saw them, clear as a bright summer's day and could do nothing but watch them as they danced and there, in the middle of it all, she saw James. 

He was naked and marked; letting blood and dirt flow between his fingers, eating flopping flesh and before she could press a hand over her mouth in her horror she was gasping - choking on her fresh terror and sitting up in bed. 

Lorna, bright-eyed, raked the darkness of her bedroom. The sheets were damp around her legs. Her hair plastered down her neck and jawline. But...it had been a dream. A fiendish nightmare and nothing more. 

So why, if it had been a dream, did she see Mr. Delaney sitting in a chair across from her? There was no doubt it was him by the burly silhouette he cast. Obscured as much as Winter and her chained souls had been on the coastline, but she knew it was him all the same. Real or apparition, there was no telling until he opened his mouth. 

The moon was dropped too low to tell, either way, leaving her room in hard black shadows and it was in these shadows James hid from her. The scuff of his boots one of the only things daring to toe the moonlight. Lorna stared at the miasma of pitch and held her breath. 

“You've seen them. Breaking backs in the flames, just as I do,” he stated this knowledge with a torrent of deep vibrancy.

A pinprick of light hovered in the dark. Lorna fingered the hem of her sheets, realizing it were his eyes that reflected the moon. 

“Don't you?” He intoned, humming to himself. Knowing. If he knew then why ask? And how, exactly was it that he knew? Another secret that niggled at her and yet more intrigue dropped upon the Delaney mystery. 

Lorna parted her lips, “...who are they?”

“They. Are. Old ones,” he bellowed from the darkness, near a whisper, but somehow booming, “Spirits. Ghosts. Demons?” James inflected and Lorna could see without seeing the wide-eyed revelry on his face, as though he expected her to cower and drag the bed sheets over her head to block out the boogeymen. She refused to lower her head at his seething words. She raised her chin instead like a shield and pressed her palms flat over the sheets, staring through the black.

“I suppose they’re the ones who whisper those things to you then?”

A soft murmuring from the dark, agreeing with her guess.

Lorna continued, hoping she looked poised as she said, “And you came across these ‘ghosts’ of yours in Africa. They tell you about the others. Who to punish. What current to choose.”

Silence. As she expected he said nothing, so either by that she was right or far from it. The only note of time passing was the moon’s illumination pulling further away from James Delaney’s boot soles until eventually, it was as if he weren’t there at all. 

“Say something will you?” She blurted to the darkness, wondering for a fleeting moment if he’d been yet another ghost or another nightmare perhaps. It would be fitting for her to go mad in this house the same as everyone else seemed to be. Was as if the house itself were a sickness, spreading its poison into the lungs of its inhabitants. A slow and wicked way to die, she thought, growing less stable as the moments passed.

Out of the darkness, she heard the strain of wood and upholstery. Yes, he was flesh and blood still yet and as though he were not that, but a demon, Lorna watched him rise from the shadows; eyes gleaming wide. He reached her in four solid steps. Each fall of his boot heel ringing inside her head. She jerked back as he sat beside her on the bed - a base primitive reaction to danger. And yes, she did fear him...but as had kept her awake most night, the fear was not entirely sane.

James watched her, his eyes squinting and widening in fractions as if he could see inside her skull to the sordid thoughts she willed away. Tight, pensive and haunting eyes he had. Lorna could do little but remain motionless under his scrutiny, hoping he’d see nothing not written on her face and leave. Just leave her be.

“How fluent are you in the Gaelic tongue?” he asked, sounding somber. Lorna blinked. He hummed to himself for a short moment and reiterated as if to a child, “I have some business outside the city that requires a translator.”

“Why would you assume I spoke Gaelic?” A few years in Ireland did not mean she spoke a lick of it, and even if she did, how would he have known? Because, Lorna reminded herself, he knows everything. Her question for a question seemed silly, knowing that James Delaney was indeed no ordinary man and the strange smile he gave her said he thought the same. Lorna shook her head, lips curling at the absurdity of it all. 

“Yes,” she answered, “I speak Gaelic.”

“Didn’t ask if you did. I asked. How well?”

“Well enough for whatever purposes you need it for I’m sure.”

James grunted in acknowledgment, eyes shifting from her to some unknown apparition dancing about the room. His head never appeared attached to his neck by bones; always moving like some exotic reptile sensing the air for movement and danger. 

“Are you comfortable here?” The question did not strike her as odd after the strange way he’d spoken to her - kind and considerate at times while both being curt and harsh. 

To answer him was difficult, but it seemed her silence and the look that crossed her face said enough because he nodded - loose and fluid - and stood back up. As he rose from her bed the glow of the moon slipped away, shrouding him, from the chest up, in darkness. Down by his belt she saw his thumb cutting against a suspender clasp. The callus, hard edge of the digit attracted her somehow.

“Be ready to leave after breakfast.”

And then he was gone, closing her door so soundlessly she had to get up and check herself that it had latched. There was no sleep the rest of the night, but the thick pounding in her chest, between her breasts, wouldn’t allow it anyhow. She was to be of some use to his cause it would seem. A delicate voice told her that Lorna Bow was not a woman ever used and to a man like James Delaney, she was but a mere tool to be set upon a particular job. He had found one for her and that was all, but Lorna sat at her vanity - a vanity once belonging to James’ mother - and watched her cheeks flush with thrilling possibilities. Life had never been a dull affair. Compared to the mystery of the Delaney’s, though, it may as well have been. And, even if she could believe the ghosts in the flames had been a dream, something stared back at her from the dead fire across from her. Knowing and unblinking. Welcome.

**Author's Note:**

> I have more of this but I wanted to hold onto it until more of the series fleshes itself out. I'm of the suspicion there is more to the actress than meets the eye. I've just allowed myself to get rather obsessed with this show and I love Lorna Bow's more relatable and inquisitive character along side James Delaney's mystical masculinity. Hopefully more to follow.
> 
> Tumblr ----> http://brimbrimbrimbrim.tumblr.com/


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